


An Affair in Stages

by just_a_dram



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Family, Friends to Lovers, Long-Distance Relationship, Loss of a Baby, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-26
Updated: 2014-10-14
Packaged: 2018-01-06 06:23:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1103473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_a_dram/pseuds/just_a_dram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It begins with a proposition, but where it will end neither of them knows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This idea won't leave me alone.

The first time he comes to her bed, he is not at all convinced it is the right thing to do. Indeed, the greater part of him doubts very much that it is. The essential part, however, gets the job done.

When the Lady Stark suggests it, he wonders if she’s more than a little mad or if she’s merely forgotten who he is, Lord Commander Snow, her bastard relation if not half-brother. The Wall is not what it was. The Night’s Watch is not what it was. He might have a spearwife and no one would question it nowadays, when the Wall is more a gateway and toll station than a mode of keeping people out of the Seven Kingdoms, but he can’t leave his post but for a few turns a year, not enough to be a husband to someone. To Sansa.

But it isn’t a husband she longs for. It’s a child.

The fire cracks and pops, filling the silence that stretches between them in her solar, once she has asked him with her hands folded primly in her lap and her face as still as ice if he would perform this favor for her.

“You want me to come to your bed and get a bastard on you?”

It is enough to set his teeth on edge. Not only because she speaks of their fucking with such calm indifference— _It would only be for the purpose of conceiving_ —but also because it happens to be the only thing she’s asked of him since she arrived from the Vale. The most she ever asks of him is not to stay away too long.

It has been a comfort to him to be able to visit Winterfell and be with Lady Stark. He looks forward to his visits with an eagerness he would have thought impossible given the damper placed on their affection for each other as children. These visits are light in his otherwise sometimes bleak existence. In Winterfell he feels at home and at peace. It is a place where petty disagreements and lust for revenge hold no sway, since Lady Stark wills it to be so and everyone follows her lead as if she is the Northern star, shining through the darkness.

No one who knows Sansa thinks to dislike her here in the North. He is no different in the sway her presence has over him, soothing his bitterness until it is naught but a longing he can’t quite name. There certainly has never been cause for quarrel between them, since he first saw her installed in the partially rebuilt halls of Winterfell, but at her proposition, anger and confusion fill him to the point that he says things he would normally not think to utter in her presence, and he can see at his words that he has spoken wrong.

“Not a bastard. The babe would be a Stark, the same as you and I.” He shakes his head. He is not a Stark. Never was. That is how it is for bastards, whether fathered by Targaryens or Starks, you’re only still a bastard. “It would be a Stark,” she says with more firmness. “No one thinks to question a Mormont woman on her right to have that be so. No one will question me.”

She is probably right. The North looks to her and the South has turned its head thanks to Jon’s own efforts. Nevertheless, Daenerys might think the North worth revisiting should her Targaryen relation get a child on the Stark traitor’s sole heir. Sansa is admirably adept at politics, she must have thought this through and have plans woven like webs in her active mind ready to be put to the ready, but at her proposition, he can’t help but question her judgment in a way he never thought to before, because while she played at being a bastard, he truly is one and he knows the cost. “You should find someone to wed if it’s children you want.”

She turns her gaze to the fire, seeing something in its dancing flames in a manner different from the witch’s. “You know very well I won’t ever marry.”

“Not all men are cruel. You might find a good man to give you more than just a child.”

“Jon,” she says, her voice filled with so much heaviness that he regrets his words.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

It is more than the rule of another house over the North or a man from another family holding sway in Winterfell that Sansa recoils from. Life taught her to be wary of men. Both the pretty ones and the fearsome ones. The ones that offer to protect and the ones that threaten. Yes, he knows very well she will never marry. Indeed, he long thought that Lady Stark would end her days a widow. Childless too, for his former sister has always been everything proper and despite the fire of her hair, he has never coupled lust with Sansa in his mind. Nor does he now, for her proposition is not a lust filled one, nothing born of that sort of thirst.

“You’re the only one I trust. If you were not the Lord Commander, I would suggest a proper union between us two and be done with it, so you wouldn’t need to concern yourself about honor.” At her words, he can’t help thinking of them two, standing in the Weirwood, she with her grey cloak draped over her shoulders and her hair curling over its edge. It’s a vision of everything he was never meant to have, a wife, children, Winterfell. Sansa. It isn’t a possibility he would have ever entertained even after he learned of his parentage, though there would be some political merit to the match and no doubt some comfort too. She reaches over and adjusts the sleeve of his tunic, her eyes downcast. “I’m not asking for you to want me. Only help me.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Married twice, surely she knows that his body must react to her if he is to help her in such a way? And if he should want her in any portion, what does that say about him, when they fought a war because of the bloody Lannisters, who thought nothing of imitating the more questionable practices of his own family? Would he then be no better than the Kingslayer, who could not keep his cock out of his sister, and spawned bastards to sit the Iron Throne?

Her finger traces the edge of his sleeve, brushing his skin. “I thought you might…want a child too?”

He does. Very much so. He has for some time, watching women pass through the gates at the Wall with babes bundled up and propped on their hips and men proudly presenting their sons to him, boasting of their adeptness with a wooden sword or a bow. He has wanted it and the desire does not fade but increase with the passing years. So it might be his own selfishness as much as the desire to make her happy, when she has known so much grief, that brings him to her chambers two nights hence stripped to his under tunic and breeches, his skin hot from two more pours from the flagon of ale than he is accustomed. Yes, she was his sister once if only _half_. No, they can never be wed. And he expects he will never feel at ease with the idea of bedding her. But he can give her this one thing—at least he suspects he can, because he tested the idea with his cock in hand alone in his chamber before he came to her, imagining the delicate grip of her elegant fingers and he achieved a cock-stand quickly enough. And he can have the one thing he had given up all hope of—a family.

The first time he comes to her bed, he’s ashamed that he’s hard again as soon as she slips off her shift and he has to clench his right hand so he doesn’t reach up to touch himself in front of her. It’s only that it’s been so long and the red of her hair between her pale legs reminds him of someone else, but he wants her, wants to be inside of her, where she’s warm and wet. She mustn’t suspect that he is no better than an animal, for she assures him, “It’s all right, Jon,” as if he is too nervous to proceed, as she holds out a hand to him to draw him to the bed.

It is awkward. A woman’s pleasure has always been his own, but he isn’t certain whether their pleasure should have any part in this and he doesn’t know how to ask, so he ends up feeling like a fumbling green boy, as he moves inside of her with his weight entirely supported by his forearms and her head turned to the side, and they’re both quiet from start to finish, when he finally spills inside of her.

Before his visit comes to a close, he comes to her bed five more times. She says it’s best they try as many times as possible and Sansa would know, he supposes, so he complies with her request. It doesn’t escape him that he debates less with himself every time the household has gone to bed whether or not he should make the walk to her chambers. By the fifth time, he can’t hold in the groan, as his cock slides inside her, can’t help but skim his hand over the soft flesh of her thigh or wrap his hand around the curve of her hip. This feels like home too. Her, her body, the surrender of her flesh to his. She smells like home in the notch below her neck, where he presses a kiss. And when she clenches around him for the first time, her fingers digging into his back and her mouth latched onto his shoulder, something in his heart breaks and he is remade as hers.

It isn’t something he can tell her, however. Not when he must leave for the Wall and leave her behind to see if his seed will quicken alone, but when she makes her usual request at the gates of Winterfell, “Don’t stay away too long,” he offers her what little he can.

His kiss lingers against the pink apple of her cheek and his thumb brushes her waist, as slim as a maid’s, and he promises to return.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second time Jon comes to her bed is very different from the first, though no less awkward for its lack of properly defined roles.

The second time Jon comes to her bed is very different from the first, though no less awkward for its lack of properly defined roles.

Ravens carry the Lady of Winterfell’s request to Jon, as ravens first carried the news of the success of their efforts in what was not a marriage bed in four simple words— _I am with child_ —and he reads the rolled strip of parchment with the same trembling hands as he has read every missive since. The message is brief. Her time draws near and she would have him by her side.

_Would it be too much to ask you to time your visit sooner than usual? Please, Jon._

He’s never ridden so hard. Not to save his life or anyone else’s. Killing he’s grown accustomed to, but this is something different. For once, instead of destroying, he’s created something. She carries his child. Though he hasn’t been there to see it for himself, he’s counted the moons, knows how far along she must be, and how soon the babe will come, how easily it would be for him to miss its arrival should he delay a day or two or should the babe come early. If Sansa wants him beside her, he will not disappoint her, so he digs his heels into the sides of his mount and rides hard, the white of the snow beneath its hooves moving in a blur, as he tucks himself close to the beast’s neck and he blinks snowflakes from his lashes.

All his eagerness, his drive to see her now, immediately, without the journey between the Wall and Winterfell between them has burned so hotly in his veins that he feels every bit the Targaryen dragon prince, though he refused to ever touch one of Daenerys’ creatures, when the offer was made. The fire is quenched, however, upon his arrival, when he is brought into her presence by a shy serving girl, who bobs too many curtsies and mumbles his title between chapped lips.

The lying-in room is the province of women, the girl warns him, as if to urge him to be on his best behavior, since the Lady of Winterfell has called for him. His arrival reached Sansa’s ears as soon as his horse was stabled. Her eagerness to see him is a balm to his soul and he feels capable of saying the things he needs to say prior to the arrival of their child, until he is admitted into her chambers, where she has retired as her time approaches. At the sight of her, however, his feet will carry him no further, frozen as fast as in ice. The serving girl at his side seems likewise dazed by Lady Sansa’s presence, although she comes to quickly enough, when Sansa dismisses her with a nod.

Jon has tried to imagine it, how Sansa might look rounded with his child, but she has always been slim, sometimes frighteningly so when the winter was deepest, and his mind failed to compose anything convincing. Whatever he managed to conjure is certainly a sorry comparison to the vision before him. Seated before her fire, in the same chair she sat when he came to bed her, her hair curls over her shoulder, thick and shiny as a copper pot, her skin looks flush and her cheeks full, her bosom is rounded, rising over the square neck of her grey gown, and her hand rests atop her high belly, her fingers pale against the lush velvet fabric. This must be what the southroners mean when they speak of the Mother. It is a vision worth worshiping.

He doesn’t know whether to kneel at her feet or kiss her full on the lips to see if she tastes as fresh as she looks and the room smells, a muddle of new rushes, lavender oil, and herbs.

He tries to speak first and see where that will lead them. “It’s good to see you looking well.”

She runs her hand down her front, pulling the pleats of fabric closer to her body. “I am enormous,” she says, the little upturn of her smile betraying her pride at that fact. “Forgive me for not standing.”

“It becomes you.”

She shakes off his compliment with a downward glance that makes her lashes fan over her cheeks.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t make it,” she says, holding her hand out to him, compelling him to move his feet.

He takes her graceful hand and kisses it, his thumb brushing over the veins that stand out under her skin, and she frowns slightly as he pulls back, letting her fingers slip from his. She wanted something else from him perhaps, but what that is, he doesn’t know. What he wants to do is envelop her in his arms, tip her head back and kiss from her ear along her jaw, down her neck, to the warmth of her bosom, and back to the place where she smells like home in the hollow of her throat. He wants to unwrap her from this dressing gown to learn her shape with his hands. But he doesn’t know what liberties he is allowed, and he suspects none of that would be welcome.

He doesn’t know his place here in the halls of Winterfell for the first time in many moons and he has no one but himself to blame. They’ve done this, they’ve shattered the tranquility, altered it forever, and he hates it in equal measure to the heady excitement he feels at the prospect of holding his own child in his arms. If he is to be allowed. He shifts on his feet and clenches his scarred hand, chasing back the insecurity that prickles his skin. Surely she would not have called him here if he is not to be allowed to hold the babe. Sansa is never cruel, he knows this about her.

“He has been so busy, I thought perhaps he would come before you could get here,” she explains, patting her stomach with a little hum that reminds him of another noise she made when last they were alone, and he is forced to swallow hard. He knows other things about her too. “He seemed overly eager, as if he wouldn’t be able to wait to meet the world. Which one of us do you think that sounds like?”

“I couldn’t say.” It reminds him more of Arya, a thought that throws him momentarily into a deeper level of unease, reminding him of what they once were, what perhaps they ought to have stayed despite the revelation of his parentage. “It might be a headstrong girl.”

“It might,” she agrees softly. “But I suspect it takes after you with your legs, for all I’ve been battered,” she says, feigning a wince.

He clears his throat, but it still sounds raspy, when he asks, “You can feel it?” May I feel it too, he wants to add.

“Usually. He’s quiet today. The maester says that means he might come soon.”

He does. Soon enough that if Jon had not left the Wall immediately and nearly ruined his horse, he wouldn’t have arrived in time for the birth. So soon that there has been no time to discuss their arrangement. No time to discuss whether he might acknowledge the babe or whether he is to play at doting uncle, while the smallfolk whisper behind their hands. For it was not long after he sat with her before the fire that her eyes grew heavy and she excused herself, promising they would speak again at dinner if he would be so kind as to join her. But before dinner is brought to her chambers, the same twitchy little serving girl comes to him in the training yard, where he works with her guards to be sure of their abilities and to distract himself, to bring him the news.

“The maester is with milady. Her pains are upon her.”

He doesn’t wait for further intelligence from the shivering girl, whose cloak is pulled tight around her bony shoulders. Doesn’t bother to ask whether Lady Stark has asked for him either. A useful bit of information to ferret out, he discovers, when he arrives at her chambers to find the door closed to him.

“There are no men admitted,” the serving girl says with brows arched high, once she’s caught up to his long strides.

“There’s a bloody maester inside,” he says, staring daggers at the iron bound door. “What about him?”

Her eyes go round and she stutters and curtsies and blinks, thrown by his gruffness in a household in which unpleasantness from anyone, no matter how grand, is not welcome, until he mumbles for a tankard of ale to give her a task to carry her away, so that no one might see how he paces before this door like a caged wolf.

He wears himself out, pacing, listening, trying to hear something through the door, but nothing but silence greets him and the occasional rustle of a servant going through the door with their hands full of things he is too distracted to take note of. The movements of servants provide some break in the monotony of waiting and a chance to press them for answers. What he wants to know most of all, besides whether Sansa is well, which they assure him repeatedly that she is, is whether she asks for him. But he can’t bring himself to ask, since the answer seems plain enough.

It is deep into the night, while standing with one hand braced on the wall and his head anchored against the door, that he gives up. He slides to the floor to sit with his legs outstretched and his shoulders curved forward until someone has need of him, this useless Lord Commander. From this spot he will not move. There is no urge to sleep, a restlessness invading his chest not dissimilar to the wakefulness that precedes battle. His heart thuds too quick and his hands can find no places to rest for long, and even if sleep would make his eyes heavy, he could not bring himself to give in, while Sansa struggles behind that door.

In the dim light of daybreak, the first noise he hears is not Sansa’s cries, for she long ago learned to conceal all pain and torment, but the babe’s, and he scrambles to his feet with his heart in his throat. They are thin, mewling cries, but surely any noise at all is a good sign, a sign of health and heartiness, and his pacing begins once more, as he whispers to himself, “I’m a father,” five times over, scrubs his brow, and exhales hard.

And when the door opens with a straining creak, he spins on his heel and barely hears the servant’s words, “Lady Stark would see you,” before he’s through the door and striding towards her bed, his boots thudding on the stone floor.

She says his name like a sigh, her fingers lifting off the coverlet they have draped over her, and he seizes them, squeezing.

“You are well?”

“I am well,” she says, her eyes slipping closed, and at her words, the assurance that he has not lost her in the bargain, something loosens in his chest for the first time in moons. “We are both well. It’s a boy.”

“A boy,” he echoes back, and her blue eyes look upon him with such affection that he almost says what he has avoided speaking aloud, almost confesses it before a room filled with people, who bustle behind his back, attending upon the infant. “As you said it would be.”

“I am always right, Jon,” she says with a soft smile.

“Always,” he agrees, covering their clasped hands.

“He’s beautiful.”

If he looks anything like Sansa, that is sure to be the case. “May I see?” he asks, looking over his shoulder.

The maester huddles over the squawking babe, who Jon can’t make out between the bodies of the two serving girls who hover with their hands pressed together, beaming down at the child he can’t see.

“We must clean him, my lord, and then my lady may have the child,” the maester responds without lifting his head from his task.

Her fingers squeeze him back and he looks down at her to see lines a worry creasing her face. “You didn’t go to bed?”

He is still in his heavy traveling clothes, never having changed after his arrival. It would hardly do to lie. “I was outside, waiting.”

“This wasn’t something you would have liked to see,” she says, her head rolling on the pillow to look towards the maester.

Their father always waited in the Great Hall, when Sansa’s lady mother was in labor. Jon knows it is the way of things that women labor while men wait, and yet, as distant as his position must keep him for most the year, he felt tethered to her on too short a lead to admit his leaving that corridor while she was in danger. He would have sat by her side and held her hand through it all if she asked for him.

“It is so warm,” Sansa says, her legs moving beneath the coverlet as if to kick it off. She is flushed and though one of the women must have brushed the hair away from her face before allowing him in, he can see how it is darkened beyond its normal hue against the linen of the pillow. It isn’t only her that feels the heat. In the leather and wool of his traveling clothes, the room feels oppressively warm and no longer smells of herbs and rushes. “They will not open a window for me.”

“Open a window for Lady Stark,” he commands, but the maester turns to him, babe in arms, and shakes his head.

“It wouldn’t be good for the babe.”

“The babe is a Stark, Maester Ellin,” Sansa says with more edge to her voice than she looks capable of at the moment with dark circles under her eyes and her arms heavy against the coverlet. She had said the child would not bear the shameful mark of Snow, but to hear her call his child a Stark, as the maester arranges the blanket around the babe’s head not a foot away from him, is nigh on unbelievable. He has got a bastard on Sansa, and they’re sure to all remind him of it soon enough. “The cold can do him no harm.”

“Best to keep him warm all the same, my lady,” the maester says without malice, as he bends to lay the babe in Sansa’s arms.

She nods at Jon. “Give him to his father first. His first son, the heir of Winterfell.”

Jon has not reached the age of five and twenty without holding a babe. He knows how one is supposed to cradle the head, support the body, and keep the child close, and yet, he feels a terror spike through him, as the child is bundled into his arms, a certainty that he will drop or somehow harm this tiny creature if he is entrusted with it and it would be better off in the arms of anyone else but him. The feeling ebbs, however, overwhelmed by something else, as he looks down on its red, scrunched face, and its slowly flailing arms to see the shock of dark hair atop its head that shows that no small part of this child is his. He would do anything to keep this child safe. He poses the child no harm.

When he comes to her bed, he comes to it as a father, and he doesn’t know quite what that will mean for any of them, but he’s as certain as Sansa about one thing, as he traces the babe’s features with one large finger.

“Open the window. He is a Stark.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is as unexpected as it is painfully disappointing when next he is invited to her bed.

It is as unexpected as it is painfully disappointing when next he is invited to her bed.

While his desire for her has not lessened, but grown, Sansa has never given any indication that their relationship is to be anything other than what it was upon his first visit after the birth of their son. Theirs is a relationship based on the gentle affection of shared parenting and a somewhat tangled past history that occasionally makes for an awkward parting at the end of the night, when Jon doesn’t know whether to kiss her cheek or take her hand or fold her tight into his chest, where he wants to keep her.

For the last two years his visits have focused on Benjen, not Sansa, though Sansa is always there, looking on, at his shoulder with a hand on his and a smile on her bowed lips. At first the babe could not do much more than burble and wave his arms, but that was enough to fill hours of their time. As far as Jon was concerned, there weren’t enough waking moments in the day during his short visits to commit all the wonders of his son to memory, and Sansa seemed to take delight in his enthusiasm. But it is a delight she never expresses more enthusiastically than with a sigh or kiss to his cheek, and Jon has no intention of shattering the impossible dream they’ve woven together here, where he is a father and she a mother and their son is the Stark heir to Winterfell, with too willing hands or a questing mouth.

This visit has brought the most changes in Benjen, something that both excites Jon for a future when he might train with his son in the yard or take him out riding in the same places he once learned how and saddens him, knowing how much he has already and will yet miss. Benjen can now walk, talk, and has a personality all his own, though he reminds him of Robb—eager and fearless with the easy ability to charm everyone around him, including his father. These are things he has acquired while Jon was far away with only Sansa’s regular letters to fill the void.

The child is aptly named. Sansa meant to pay honor to the tradition of Stark men at the Wall as well as recognize Jon’s own fondness for their uncle by naming him Benjen, but the resemblance the child bears to those who came before him has grown more striking over the past twelve moons. He has Jon’s dark hair and the makings of a sharp, Stark face, and his eyes are as blue as his great uncle’s before him. Although, Jon always sees Sansa in the boy’s smiling eyes.

“You’re quite the pair,” Sansa says, as he shifts the heavy, hot sleeping child with boneless limbs onto his shoulder.

The nursemaid will come shortly to usher Benjen away, but the boy lost the fight with sleep some time ago, having been kept up past his bedtime nightly since Jon’s arrival three days previous.

“Are we?” Jon asks, pushing back the hair that curls over his son’s brow to expose the unmarked, pale skin beneath that life has not yet etched.

“I like looking at the two of you together,” Sansa says, as she leans down to tuck away her embroidery in the basket at her feet.

There is something about her tone that makes the smile the breaks on his face feel somewhat wolfish, but he buries it in the crook of the child’s neck.

“I like looking on the two of you too,” he says, when she has righted herself and placidly folded her hands over the skirts of her blue gown. “My two favorite people.”

“Flatterer,” she says, letting her head rest against the back of her chair.

The fire reflects in the hair that winds over her shoulder, lighting it until it shines like liquid metal. He likes seeing himself in his son, it’s a reassurance that it’s real, that he’s a father and this is his son, but it’s a shame there’s no closer copy of Sansa’s incomparable beauty in this world.

“You’re his favorite as well,” she says, nodding towards the boy, whose mouth is parted in sleep. “He took to you as if no time had passed.”

Jon does not delude himself. He knew coming here that his son would not recognize him, would not remember him from when last he came, even though Sansa speaks of him to their son every day. She swears it in every letter, and he knows better than to doubt her. She is a good mother, the kind he would have been lucky to have, and she takes it as part of her duty to remind Benjen that he has a father, who is thinking of him, while he is away.

Jon rubs his hand over Benjen’s back, feeling the breath fill and leave his little body. “He’s warm hearted. He likes everyone and everything.”

“It’s a good thing.”

“It’s a very good thing,” Jon agrees. “He’s a sweet boy.” Sansa’s greatest gift is her ability to love, and if their son has inherited it, all the better. “But it makes it rather difficult to say for certain whether he doesn’t like the stable boy just as much as he does me.”

“Don’t jape. You’re so very special to him. You’re special to us, Jon.”

This would be his opening to tell her he loves her even if she mistakes his meaning for something less than what he intends, but the nursemaid bustles in and the moment slips through his fingers. They kiss the sleeping boy’s forehead and watch him be bundled from the room by the slightly disapproving older woman, who thinks visiting father or no, children should always be in bed at their appointed bedtimes.

It isn’t so late that Jon feels he must leave, but with the child gone the awkward feeling settles into his bones. Reaching for his furs, he is readying himself to bid her goodnight, when her hand settles on his arm.

“Don’t go.” It is what he’s longed to hear, a hushed request in the dark of night with only a fire to light her chamber. “Stay.”

It’s the way she says it, low and throaty, the way she looks at his lips, and how her fingers toy with his over tunic that has his hand in her hair and cupping the back of her head, bringing her lips to his without any further prompting. They hadn’t done this last time. They hadn’t wound their arms around each other and kissed and tugged until their bodies were flush together. This is different, better, more, until her hand splays against his chest and she draws back enough to exhale shakily and say, “Benjen deserves a house full of brothers and sisters. Like we had.”

He looks down at her, stupidly, owlishly, trying to unhear what she’s said, so he can scoop her up and carry her to her bed and show her what he’s so very bad at putting into words, but she keeps speaking, sinking the certainty of what this plea of hers is really about into his gut. “I want him to have siblings. I want us to try for more.”

He could walk out, reject this offer, which is a mockery of what he would like to be for her, but there is an eagerness that tightens his stomach, an eagerness to accept whatever she offers, so as to make her happy and feel her body beneath his. His hands trail through the silky strands of her hair, imagining wrapping the length of it around his fist to tilt her head back so as to kiss her neck, while he moves inside of her.

His face must betray the conflict that burns inside him, for she reaches up and draws her hand over his cheek with a look of concern replacing the heady excitement of a moment earlier, as she speaks his name in question. “Wouldn’t you like more?”

He wants more from her, yes. But that isn’t what she offers.

He’ll give her the next child she wants, a little boy or girl with her blue eyes and auburn locks, but he’ll give her more besides, which is why he bends down to grasp her by the knees and pull her off her feet so quick that she scrambles to hold tight. He won’t leave her bed tonight either, once he’s spilled his seed, slinking off as if he has something to be ashamed of, as if he is a stud horse to be put out to pasture after his duties are done. She is asking for more and he’ll give it to her, though the knowledge of what they lack sours the pleasure into a sad imitation of what it might be.

He knows it’s folly, trying to make her love him by wringing one panted crest after another from her until her limbs shiver from exhaustion. It’s folly to cleave to her, wrapping his arm around her waist and pulling her back against his chest until their breathing falls into sync and they drift into sleep. It won’t work. She said from the start that she didn’t need him to want her, and that he does is his dilemma, not hers. And yet, when the sun begins to creep over the horizon, lighting the room with its pale light, he can’t help but roll her over and find the cradle of her hips once more. If he beds her in the light of day is it not more real than in the light of a dying fire?

She greets him with a groggy noise he can feel under his lips as he traces the arch of her neck with his mouth. “You’re still here.”

“I’m still here.”

“And you’re awake,” she teases, shifting beneath him so that he rubs against her soft stomach.

“Very awake,” he agrees with a nip to the dip in her neck.

She pulls his head off her breast, her hands framing his face, and fixes him with a sleepy smile. “You could come to me tonight,” she says, stroking his cheeks with amused affection at his unaccustomed impatience. “We have time yet.”

“I’ll do both.”

“Jon,” she whines, even as he brushes her center with his morning cock-stand. “My girl will be in any moment to stir the fire.”

“You shall have to try to be quiet then,” he urges her with a tilt of his hips.

She was not quiet last night as her heels dug into his back and the noise she makes as he buries himself inside of her promises that the serving girl will not long be in doubt of what goes on between her lady and the Lord Commander, though Jon pauses to pull the furs up over their heads to preserve Sansa’s modesty. That she doesn’t object is a surprise, but what he wants to wring from her is more than welcomed pleasure.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Jon comes to Sansa's bed again, it is tragedy that draws him and the moment is marked with a finality that makes his blood go cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a heavy chapter with tragedy as its focus. Check the newly updated tags if you're concerned about content. It springs from my own anxieties several months ago.

When he comes to her bed again, it is tragedy that draws him and the moment is marked with a finality that makes his blood go cold.

Jon is intercepted by the maester before he reaches Winterfall’s hall’s heavy wooden door, an oddity, for Maester Ellin is usually one of the last faces Jon sees upon his arrival, the maester being too occupied with his numerous duties to be in any rush to greet the Lord Commander.

It is only the last of several oddities surrounding his visit. He received the raven’s message, _You best come_ , two moons before he was due to leave for Winterfell, a departure chosen to coincide with the expected arrival of the new babe of which Sansa so eagerly wrote to him after he arrived back at the Wall. The brief directive alone would not have kindled his fear, but the hand was not Sansa’s and that was enough to send him packing without proper preparations for his journey or the organization of his men in his absence. It was always Sansa’s elegant hand on the parchment when he unrolled a raven’s message from Winterfell. Something was not right.

He concocted dozens of scenarios to explain what kept her from writing, and despite some of them being most dire, he was still unprepared for the unnatural gloom that hung over the yard, as he rode breathless through the gates. The pudgy boy who came to greet him as he dismounted hardly met his eye, and Jon couldn’t make out anything he said other than the milords the boy mumbled, when he took the reins and drew the foam covered steed toward the stables.

And the maester looks no less anxious than the untutored boy.

“What’s wrong here?”

The maester shakes his head and gestures through the door, urging Jon to enter. “Lady Stark is in her chamber. She asked that you be sent for, when you arrived, but you should know she isn’t herself. She will look very pale to you.”

“Is she ailing?”

“She will be fine given time. If you could encourage her to leave her rooms, it might do her some good. I’m afraid my counsel nor anyone else’s has been much welcome. She might listen to you. That has been my hope.”

Jon can feel what goes unspoken souring the air, causing the heaviness that seems to infect the whole of this place, which Sansa previously breathed life back into with her warm presence and gentle smiles. “The child then?”

Maester Ellin shakes his head again. “I’m so sorry, my lord. There was nothing to be done. It came early. These things sometimes happen.”

Jon’s seen it happen to other women, to strong free folk, who give birth in tents and dirt floored homes, and well pampered ladies alike, but it doesn’t make the pain any less raw because it is not unique. He remembers vividly the feeling of holding his son, of knowing Benjen was his and that he and Sansa had created something good. He has spent no small amount of time thinking on what this child would feel like in his arms, who the babe might take after in appearance and spirit, how their character might take shape over time, new facets of their personality revealed with each letter that relates the minutia of life at Winterfell and every visit. None of that is to be.

Each step he takes towards Sansa’s chambers is more of a struggle than the one before it. He wants to be at her side and he fears it. What can he say that will be more welcomed than the words of the maester? By nature of their arrangement, they exist in a place of limbo that gives their interactions a rippling undercurrent that is nothing like the easy comfort he once felt when visiting the Lady Stark. The strain between them will hardly be conducive towards healing, but he pushes on through echoing corridors and hesitates for only a moment before announcing his arrival with a knock.

When the serving girl shuffles him through the door and exits in a soft whisper of slippers on stone, his eyes fix on the reclined figure draped in furs with her head propped up by more than one pillow. She looks shockingly pale, even though she lies against bleached linens. Pale enough that he doubts the maester’s promise that all will be well with Lady Stark and that all that is required is some fresh air and a removal from her closed up chambers.

In the end it is Sansa that does most of the talking. The babe was a girl, as she had written she suspected it might be, ever right as always. There seemed nothing wrong with the babe to look at her. She was perfect though small. Nothing unusual about the moons that preceded the birth either, but Maester Ellin said that is sometimes the way of things. Sansa gave directions that the body be placed within the great stone sarcophagus that holds the bones of their father if Jon wants to visit her. There is nothing inscribed to note the babe’s recent resting place, for Sansa waited to bestow upon her a name in the event that Jon wanted to do the choosing.

He manages to say nothing of opening a window or leaving this chamber behind for a healthier view in the midst of these hollow sounding, murmured declarations. Words fail him as he feared they would. He is by nature a man of nature. And when he feels as if his unfocused apologies have done no good and holding her hand as he perches on the edge of her bed has proven not to be enough to drag her from the distant place her mind seems fixed in, he is compelled to offer her whatever comfort he can. Comfort they might share. The comfort of each other’s arms, the comfort of a kiss to her brow, to her cheek, and breaths drawn close enough to her neck that he can lose himself in the smell of her.

At first he has reason to believe this is the right course. For her fingers slide over his doublet and her head tucks into his chest and her babbling explanations for a tragedy without reason cease, as he slides his arm around the small of her back, pulling her into him, where he always wants her, where he can fool himself into believing she might be safe. But then she goes so rigid that he can’t help but do the same, and her hand, which only a moment ago sought him, pushes weakly back until there is space between them, space he gives her without a fight.

“We can’t,” she says.

Her red rimmed eyes do not meet his, though he tilts his head in an attempt to see what it is that shines in them, as she retreats further into herself.

“Can’t what?” he prods.

“Can’t do that,” she says, one hand fluttering up from the linens where they are splayed to wave at the renewed space between them.

His brow creases, and he works to keep his voice even as he asks, “You don’t wish me to touch you?”

Her eyes cut to his, sharp and almost wild. “No, not as man and woman, Jon.”

He shifts on the bed, increasing the distance between them, as his body reels from an accusation that stings as sharply as any slap. “Is that what you thought I meant to try? With you as pale as death? With our babe freshly put to rest?”

“No. Yes.”

Her head shakes back and forth twice in quick succession at her contradictory assertions, as if trying to throw off some mad thought, and he regrets his hastiness. Yes, he is wounded by her and laid open by the news of their loss, but he has not said much to express that hurt, to share it so she might understand she is not alone. And she is not herself. It is not only the wan look of her that betrays it.

“I would never, Sansa.”

Timing makes the notion abhorrent. Habit makes it unthinkable. He has always waited for her. Coming to her has always been on her terms and at her biding. His bit is her cool exterior. His bridle her carefully chosen words.

Her hand rakes through her hair. It is newly brushed. She does not look well, but her coppery hair drawn over one shoulder and brushed until it shines provides some semblance of the face she usually shows to the world. Someone at least has tended to her here in this bed, draping her in a thin veil of illusion. A devoted serving girl, no doubt. Sansa is more at ease with women, as a rule. Jon was an exception to that rule, until he wasn’t.

Her eyes slip closed, as she draws a breath deep enough to make the linens slip slightly from where they are pulled up high on her chest. “Of course you wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t.”

Perhaps she says it aloud so that the truth of it might penetrate the fog of her grief, to assure herself that she is safe in this moment with him.

“I’ve only come to be with you, as you requested. To talk or be still. Whatever is best.”

“We must talk. We were selfish. I was selfish. No, that isn’t right. It was my idea, I know. You wouldn’t have urged it on me.”

It’s the babbling again, but more feverish sounding than before, manic in its quickness and lack of focus.

“You’re tired,” he tries, but she stirs beneath the linens and her arms stiffen from shoulder to fingertip until her hands are balled tightly.

“We already have Benjen. How selfish of me was it to ask for more? I know how the world works. I know well how fleeting happiness is. I might have died, Jon.”

Maester Ellin said nothing of this, and Jon isn’t sure whether she is confessing something new about the circumstances of the babe’s birth or whether she speaks solely in hypotheticals. Even in her flat explanations, she said nothing of personally being in danger; she spoke only of the girl child they had lost.

“What would have become of Benjen? He would have been alone and left undefended, unloved.”

His hand finds hers once more, working her fingers apart until he might weave his with hers and clutch her tightly, the only part of her he dare touch. “Benjen will never be alone.”

He didn’t father a child to leave it uncared for in this world. Jon might not have had parents left to tend him in his infancy, but Ned Stark taught him what responsibility is, what love is.

“You have your duty. I know what that is to you.”

She has never lectured him on the fact that he leaves to return to the Wall after every visit, never chastised him about the things he misses while he is gone, never begs anything of him other than that he return as soon as he is able. But there is an edge to her weary voice and the bite of her nails into the skin of hand.

If she knew he loved her, she might at least understand what the cost of that duty is, the cost beyond just leaving his son to know his father through stories told by his mother. Benjen is not his only regret, when he rides away with Winterfell receding behind him. To confess it now, however, seems a cruelly empty gesture. She has gone through yet another tragedy alone, deserted for sworn duty. His love did nothing to save her from that fate. It’s a trite, worthless thing.

“My duty isn’t everything.”

If it was, there would be no private choice to make every time his departure for the Wall drew near and no sleepless nights alone in his Lord Commander’s chambers.

“What, you would take the heir of Winterfell to live at the Wall?” she asks, flipping over their clasped hands to reveal one of his scars, the burn he bears from the fire.

Would he? Jon was destined for a life at the Wall from the time he gave wail in his mother’s arms, he supposes, but it would be no place for Benjen. He was born to other things as the Stark heir. As Lord Commander, Jon has a responsibility to the kingdom and to the men of the Night’s Watch, but Jon has a responsibility to Benjen too, one that requires his son be seated here in the house of his ancestors.

“Gods forbid, if something, anything were to happen to you, I would come here, Sansa. I would leave the Wall and see to it that our son was raised up to be a man you would be proud of. I swear it.”

He has been a vow breaker more than once, but he has never broken a vow made to her. That much he can say and hopefully she takes solace in it.

“Thank you,” she says on a heavy exhale.

He doesn’t want her thanks, but he accepts it as graciously as he knows Sansa expects. Her courtesies are a shield, an armor she wears that protects her from all manner of things, including him.

Her shoulders straighten and her chin lifts in a tired attempt at the resumption of her ladylike dignity, as she says, “I can rest easier knowing that, but there can be no talk of more children. It isn’t a risk I can undertake. You understand that?”

We still must discuss the threat of my troubling your bed, he wants to ask? “Yes.”

“Good. We understand each other.”

Not properly. Unless she will let him share her grief and her happiness in equal measure, he will never know her as he wishes to nor she him. If she did, she would understand how odious her repeated pleas not to come to her as a lover are to him, how they cut him, when what he wants from her truly has never been about children or her body.

“Yes.”

“Benjen will want to see you.”

It is a dismissal made only clearer by the disengaging of their hands and the gentle pat she gives him. Fear steals around his heart as cold as winter snows, and his mind churns to find something to request of her, something that still fits within their constructed limits, so that he might not lose her altogether. He needs her. More now than ever.

“May I come see you tonight? Might I sup with you?”

“If I am not sleeping.”

He thinks perhaps she will be. By design.

They are broken. Irreparably. And he knows in his heart that there will never be anything more than this.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The years have been good to the both of them.

Since Sansa barred him from her bed, the years have been good to the both of them. With time has come a return to the comfort he once enjoyed within the halls of Winterfell under the rule of its new lady. It is not as if his desire for her has faded, but with the potential of another disappointing invitation to Sansa’s bed removed, he has allowed himself to accept what they are precisely to each other. What they are is more than he ever expected. They are parents together during his visits to Winterfell, they are friends, and they are family. He will never forget that Sansa gave him that immeasurable gift the night she asked him for a child.

Jon’s visits and the accounts of life at Winterfell that he receives from Sansa between those visits are what he looks forward to during the execution of the sometimes duties that fill his days at the Wall. Anything would count as monotony in comparison with the boy that awaits him at the seat of the Starks. Benjen is the joy of his life. Counting eight name days, Benjen is the precocious lord of Winterfell, but he is also still Jon’s little boy. Enough so that when Benjen is tired out from an afternoon of training with a wooden sword opposite his father and falls asleep against his mother’s shoulder before her blazing hearth, Jon can easily recall the curve of the child’s face when he was but a babe at his Sansa’s breast. Benjen would balk at being carried to bed in his nurse’s arms as he was once, however. Which is why he summons whatever childlike dignity he possesses, when Maester Ellin comes to escort him back to his chamber, and shuffles along closely behind the maester’s dark robes. But not before kissing his mother goodnight on the cheek and accepting a hair ruffle from his father with a sleepy smile.

There was a time when awkwardness would have settled over the room after Benjen was sent to bed. There were years when each visit was filled with uncertainty. What were they without Benjen present? What were they with the bed they shared to conceive their children looming like a specter in the background? That is no longer the case. Now they sit close together in companionable silence on a bench narrow enough that her skirts overlap Jon’s leg, and he thinks nothing of reaching for her hand so that he might hold it in his lap.

He has never asked what occupies her mind during their quiet nights. Jon presumes Sansa spends them thinking of Benjen. She might also sometimes allow her thoughts wander to those members of their family who are gone, some of whom bore a striking resemblance to Benjen either in looks or temperament. Jon’s silence is often consumed with such thoughts, but it is a private indulgence that is no longer quite as painful as it once was.

They are content to think of their family rather than their own little personal drama. Most nights this is how they spend their time alone together, the soft rustle of her embroidery the arrhythmic accompaniment to his observance of the fire’s bright dance, while his mind wanders. But when she interrupts the silence on this night to ask whether she might ask something personal of him—a request he grants without hesitation—it is not of their family that she speaks.

“Do you have a…woman at the Wall?”

It is as shocking a question as the one she posed to him nine name days prior, when she asked him, her former brother and Lord Commander, to get a child on her. Perhaps more so, since it is an affront to his honor and Sansa is always so very careful not to give offense. It cuts more deeply than when they were children and she used to refer to him as her bastard brother with pointed preciseness. It hurts more, because Sansa is not that same girl, who thoughtlessly parroted back the label that stung most. Everything she says now is given great forethought. She understands the cost of poorly considered words as well as action, which is why he knows there is nothing careless about this query.

The delivery is so cautiously guarded that it fails to betray what she might mean by asking him about another woman. Nothing to betray whether it is an accusation or banal inquiry. Whether there are rumors afoot that she takes as an insult to the good name of their family or whether she merely assumes all men are so inclined and inquires about the details of his habits to alleviate the tediously quiet domesticity that he holds so dear.

Whatever his feelings at her affront, their serenity has been hard earned, and he schools his voice to remain level when he responds to her so as not to disturb it. Though he knows if she glances up at his face and away from the flickering flames, she will see his discomfort written on his face.

“You imagine I keep a whore?”

“No, I wouldn’t suggest such a thing. I know you better than that.” She shakes her head, looking down into her lap, as her fingers twitch against his palm. “I meant a spearwife? Is that not what you call them?”

“Yes. No,” he quickly corrects lest she misunderstand. “Some of the men have spearwives, but I would never do that.”

To you, he thinks, though she never requested fidelity from him either when they sometimes dallied in her bed or since. Theirs has never been a romantic arrangement. Not in her eyes. Otherwise she would never need to ask whether another woman warms his bed.

“Would it be so terrible? To be happy?”

“I am happy,” he says, giving her hand a squeeze, and at least she squeezes him back with as much gentle force.

“But your visits are short.”

Sansa is perceptive enough to understand his meaning. It isn’t that he is always happy. He is not. But he never was enamored with songs the way Sansa was. His idealism was of a different sort. As happy as his childhood was and as fondly as he looks back on that time, there were enough harsh realities related to his position in their family that he was spared the destructive notion that his life would be one of uninterrupted happiness.

There is the time spent here and that which is spent at the Wall, and even at the Wall he is not what he would call unhappy. Not uniformly at least. It’s only that there is somewhere else he would rather be.

“My visits are as long as I can make them.” And dearer to him because of their brevity.

“I worry about you at the Wall, alone. I hate the thought of it.”

“Don’t worry about me, Sansa.”

She tilts her head and he can just make out the stubborn set of her jaw—an expression he’s seen more than once on Benjen and perhaps wrongly assumed he inherited from someone other than his mother—when she doggedly insists, “But it would be someone to take care of you.”

“I am perfectly well looked after, as you are.”

He might wish it was he who looked after her here, but he is comforted by the knowledge that her household is dedicated to her and that she is safe. That is something he never doubts.

“It isn’t the same.”

No, it isn’t. The Wall is not Winterfell. Castle Black is not even what Castle Black once was. He makes shift, but he would never describe his life there as one of comfort. Jon can imagine how a woman and a partner would improve his life, and he is not the only one deserving of that sort of comfort.

Regardless, if it was Sansa who wanted to take another man to her bed, a prospect Jon realizes he never thought to fear, he couldn’t look on the match with such equanimity as she appears to. It might very well bring her the consolations of the flesh and affection that he can’t offer her from afar, but it would stir nothing but the blackest envy in his heart.

“Don’t think to compare it, what we have,” she continues. “I have Benjen, and I’m here at home, _our_ home.”

It finally sinks in what she is about. That she suggests he take a lover does not mean she cares not who warms his bed. It is quite the opposite. She cares enough to put whatever petty feelings such an arrangement might engender in her aside in hopes that he would not be so very alone, while she and Benjen are here together in Winterfell, which under different circumstances might have been his home too.

There were those who said Robb made Winterfell his through legitimization. There were whispers of a will that made Robb’s wishes plain. Whatever became of that document, if it ever existed, it was long lost, the victim of war and winter. But there were other ways he might have come to call Winterfell his. It was offered to him by both Stannis Baratheon and the Dragon Queen, his aunt. He might even have taken it for himself, when he led armies through the North. But Winterfell has been Sansa’s since the day Robb was betrayed and their younger brothers lost to them forever. It has been Jon’s duty to defend Sansa’s claim even against those who would rather he sat the North’s seat.

It strikes him that he’s never told her as much. “I wouldn’t have you anywhere else. This is where you belong.”

Her bright blue eyes shift to gaze upon their clasped hands and there is a pause lengthy enough that Jon wonders whether she intends to say nothing further on the subject, putting an end to it as suddenly as it began, but then she says with more quiet apprehension than she has previously betrayed, “No more than you do.”

He doesn’t know what to do with that. “I do fine where I am.”

“Truly? Aren’t you lonely, Jon?”

It’s something about the way she speaks to him, how she seems to lean into his side as she expresses her concern that makes him wonder whether she is not sometimes lonely too, despite Benjen and Winterfell and a household of people that love her. Something about her selflessness and the quiet kind of bravery she summoned in encouraging him to find happiness where he might that makes him confess it, that which he has never thought to confess before.

“Only for you.”

She looks up at him at last, her mouth turning down at the corners, as she draws his hand up to her bosom, where she is warm and soft. “Oh, Jon.”

“Didn’t you know?”

All she manages to give is a little shake of her head, though her lips part to form words that die on her tongue.

He raises his other hand to cup her cheek in what will probably be a vain attempt to smooth away the sadness his words have created on her lovely face. “I didn’t say it to make you sad. I just need you to know.”

It isn’t his imagination this time, when she presses her cheek into his hand and wets her lips. “What do I mean to you?”

“Everything.”

Her eyes slip closed and the way she melts into him reminds him of how she feels in his arms bare against his chest. It’s the same soft look she wore the last time they were together. The same yielding curve of her shoulders, the same tightening of her fingers around his. Maybe he was wrong all along about what she wanted from him. Maybe they were both so very wrong.

“Sansa,” he says, stroking her cheek with the curl of his finger. “You said once that I didn’t need to want you, but I do.”

“Show me.”

“You made me promise that Benjen would be the last,” he reminds her, pressing his brow to hers.

“Never mind that. Just show me,” she urges, as she closes the distance between their lips.

He does. When he comes to her bed, he shows her how he wants her in ways he was never free to before. Freed from insecurity and the limits of self-imposed rules, he feels closer to her than before with his face buried in the crook of her neck and his cock moving inside of her. Tracing the lines of her body with his hands, mapping the rise and fall of her flesh with his mouth, he feels as if he is not an interloper, but someone who belongs. They belong to each other, as they belong to Benjen and Winterfell. They fit.

He shows her the depth of his feelings, laying himself bare, as he always wanted but feared to, but he tells her too.

“I love you,” he says from between her thighs, and with her fingers twined in his hair, pulling hard enough to draw a wolfish smile from his wet lips, she gasps out a prayer to the gods and swears she loves him too.

She says it enough times that he believes it long before it is time to leave for the Wall. This time, when he brings her to her peak again and again over the course of that night and the next morn and in a stolen moment pressed against a tapestry in an infrequently visited corner of the castle, it isn’t with the objective of making her love him, it is with the fresh certainty that she does.

His visit has never felt so brief. His heart never so full. There is no spearwife to return to at the Wall, but there is something—something that bears no proper name—and someone dearer to him that he says goodbye to before the gates of Winterfell. Jon thought he knew the depth of want, but as he rides away, Sansa and Benjen’s silhouettes growing smaller with every stride of his mount, he feels the loss of her, their family, and their home as he never has before. For now he knows what truly could have been.


End file.
